First, a story. I loathe mechanical hard drives. They’re painfully slow, annoyingly finicky, and prone to failure — the consumer ones, anyway. Toss one in a cheap USB 3.0 enclosure, however, and you’ve got a bona fide recipe for disaster. I’m sure I could find millions who’d comment that their [insert external HDD here] is still humming fine after a few years, but my wife and I have blown through six failures in the past four years. Brand, capacity, bus — it matters not. These things just aren’t designed for being used in a coach airline seat, thrown around at will, and generally having their key attribute (read: mobility) being taken advantage of.